Orchestral Tools: Tom Holkenborg's Percussion

[FriFlo]

Regarding price: for abut the same price you get a full drum VST including multiple drum kits. It is of course not the same product, but it is comparable and - if you pick the right one - you can do quite similar stuff with this drum VST as with JXL percussion plus a ton more.

If you picked up this drum library at a discount, you'd even have cash left to buy some ethnic drums from 8dio or Soundiron to get some of that epic percussion sounds in your pallet.

I knew where I would rather place MY money, but of course everyone has to decide that for himself ...

[Ashermusic]

If it sells a lot it was priced right. If not, maybe not.

[NoamL]

To explain myself nicely, I'll give you an example. Here is how my custom davul (tupan) library sound:
etc.

You certainly have a valid point - but there's a good chance Holkenborg wasn't going for a traditional tupan sound - but instead wanted one aspect of the tupan (the main strike) to integrate into his Hollywood cinematic drum style. I don't think he was doing an ethnomusicological study.

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I know he wasn't going for a traditional sound. But It's common for developers to hide behind the word "cinematic" for percussion and I'm tired of it. They are like "We have a lot of exotic/ethnic percussion in our catalog. We didn't know how to play them so we hit the center of the drum with a stick a few times. We recorded in a large room and processed the sound. They are cinematic now, we decided."
Sample library market is filled with this kind of libraries.
People think there are way too many percussion libraries in the market, I don't. There is a difference between playing musical instruments and hitting objects in my opinion. I expect developers to learn what they're sampling or find someone who knows. I think that would be "professional".

You're quite right. Imagine someone doing "sampling" like this to an instrument like a riq or a bodhran or even a djembe. People would see the problem there because they know there is a performance practice and just hitting the drum at various velocities doesn't cover what the players actually do.

A hits-only library is going to inherently be very limited even for epic drums. Can you create CONVINCING rolls with sequential hits? You can't really do it on timpani and I expect these drums to be no different?

Even the stuff like the taikos in Albion III from years ago, which are auxiliary instruments in an Albion-style no frills collection, still contain rim hits, stick clacks, rolls, several kinds of hits... for each drum... yeah I know, I'm Spitfire shilling...

From the walkthrough this library reminds me of AudioImperia Cerberus which I bought based on the impressive aggressiveness of its hits and the well produced, trailery demo tracks. But I ended up using it much less than libraries that have more diverse articulations. If anyone wants a hits-only library, I think the Heavyocity "Master Ensembles" have an excellent sound, wide dynamic range, and they have enough diversity among the instruments that you can kind of use each ensemble like a drumkit.

With MIDI and sampling being what they are, when you have to have an energetic perc performance all in MIDI and in a deadline, I think there is a lot to be said for finding an appropriate audio loop to cover 1 percussion part - and then augmenting that performance, & breaking up the loopiness, with MIDI articulation based drumming in accompanying registers above or below the loop.

[Ashermusic]

Noam wrote: “ I think there is a lot to be said for finding an appropriate audio loop to cover 1 percussion part - and then augmenting that performance, & breaking up the loopiness, with MIDI articulation based drumming in accompanying registers above or below the loop.”

Noam, I agree.

[Yasin Yavuz]

You're quite right. Imagine someone doing "sampling" like this to an instrument like a riq or a bodhran or even a djembe. People would see the problem there because they know there is a performance practice and just hitting the drum at various velocities doesn't cover what the players actually do.

A hits-only library is going to inherently be very limited even for epic drums. Can you create CONVINCING rolls with sequential hits? You can't really do it on timpani and I expect these drums to be no different?

Even the stuff like the taikos in Albion III from years ago, which are auxiliary instruments in an Albion-style no frills collection, still contain rim hits, stick clacks, rolls, several kinds of hits... for each drum... yeah I know, I'm Spitfire shilling...

From the walkthrough this library reminds me of AudioImperia Cerberus which I bought based on the impressive aggressiveness of its hits and the well produced, trailery demo tracks. But I ended up using it much less than libraries that have more diverse articulations. If anyone wants a hits-only library, I think the Heavyocity "Master Ensembles" have an excellent sound, wide dynamic range, and they have enough diversity among the instruments that you can kind of use each ensemble like a drumkit.

With MIDI and sampling being what they are, when you have to have an energetic perc performance all in MIDI and in a deadline, I think there is a lot to be said for finding an appropriate audio loop to cover 1 percussion part - and then augmenting that performance, & breaking up the loopiness, with MIDI articulation based drumming in accompanying registers above or below the loop.

Thanks. Yeah, I agree. Also I pointed out the tupan, because it's one of the oldest percussion instruments in the world. It has different names and shapes like davul, tabal, tupan, dhol etc. and still commonly being used in Asia, Africa and Europe. So you don't have to be a musicologist to know what it is. Maybe Tom just discovered it and thought playing it like a tom made it sound cinematic or whatever. But it looked ridiculous to me that he was trying to explain it with wrong information like "it doesn't have wide dynamic range"
Yes, true tremolo/roll is very different to programmed multisamples.
I prefer deeply sampled natural instruments to severely limited cinematic designed sounds. I mean we can use reverb or compressor for a library but we can't add articulations or round robins.